Have you ever wanted to learn how to draw a dog? If so, by the end of following my guide, you will have achieved a charming illustration of an animal that to so many of us, truly are our best friends.
Dogs, our fur covered family members that come to us in endless breeds of all shapes, beautiful shades and a vast variety of sizes. They cannot talk to us with words and yet they bring the deepest friendships, unconditional love, unforgettable moments of joy and wonderful affection. Many humans even prefer the company of dogs to anything else on this earth!
If you are a dog owner, like me, you will be used to seeing your dog getting up to all sorts and without knowing it, you will be familiar with the way it moves around.
From the way your dog sits, moves its head, walks along on a lead, to the way it bounds around excitedly in the fields.
From the subtle intricacies of its personality, how it tilts its head to the side to listen intently, to its eyes looking into yours, to the way it gives you that look of ‘ please may I have another biscuit ? ‘
If you are simply a dog fan and would love to learn how to capture the essence of these wonderful animals in just a few simple steps that you can practice and build upon over time, then let’s get you all set to get started.
Even if you don’t own a dog, I have no doubt that you will have often observed them whilst out and about, or watched them in action on a screen.
Dog owner, dog fan, absolute beginner or artist – before starting to draw our four legged best friends, it is absolutely beneficial to take a look at how they move.
Have a think about their structure and get familiar with the particular breed that you wish to draw first.
Enjoy looking at them in life, in books and online. Notice how they move and consider that they are made up of essential organs, blood, fat, muscle and bone.
Of course, all of these elements that make up our doggies are covered in a particular type of fur depending on the breed of the dog.
Art Materials You Will Need
HB pencil sharpened
Propelling pencil – I like Favor – Castell Apollo pencil 2327 with 0.7 fine lead
Soft eraser or putty rubber
Tracing Paper – I like Stephens Tracing Pad 73gsm 30 sheet pads
Fine line pens for inking, I love:
Derwent Line Maker 0.3 Sepia and O.1
Staedtler Pigment Liner 0.3 black
Uni pin Fine Line Brush pen Sepia
Gelly Roll 08 White Fine Line
Paint Brushes suitable for Watercolour artwork – I love ProArte brush Stephen Coates size 10 for working wet into wet
Choose two or three smaller round fine heads 1’s or 2’s to use for adding details and I also like a small square ended brush for dabbing colour on to the paper and creating fur textures.
Pencil Crayons – sharpened of course, my favorites are Derwent Watercolour Pencils
Watercolour pans – I love my Windsor and Newton Colman ‘Sketchers Pocket Set’
Paper Types
Any kind of cartridge sketching paper will do for initial warming up exercises and practice shapes.
Water colour paper – I use Bockingford pressed block watercolour paper for watercolour and pen and ink studies
Cardstock or cartridge paper of 250gsm for achieving defined line drawings and striking ink drawings or a layering a combination of media.
Starter exercise
Grab a sharpened HB pencil and a piece of drawing paper and simply enjoy the process of making marks, lines and shapes on your paper as you watch a dog move about either in real life or on screen.
This will help you to get into a flow, loosen your hand and fingers and help you to avoid overthinking.
Reference Material
Now choose your reference material. You will need a good quality photograph of the dog you would like to draw. I suggest finding a full colour photograph of your chosen dog standing and in a side-on stance.
When I produce dog portraits or illustrations, I find it helpful to have the photograph I am working from displayed on my tablet and with the tablet propped up directly in front of me.
Basic Shapes
The form of a dog can be broken down into simple shapes to help us to achieve the correct proportions and stance.
Sketching out the dogs body, head and snout (this is the protruding part of a dogs face including its nose, mouth and jaw) even its legs, ears and tail can be achieved using a series of basic shapes.
We will use mainly ovals and circles of various shapes and sizes, but also some triangles.
Triangles are helpful for mapping out nose and jaw shapes, eye and ear positioning and the snout shapes of dogs. Of course, there are some breeds such as Pugs and Boxers that have a flat shape to their face.
On a piece of sketching paper, have a practice at allowing your HB pencil to flow smoothly. Create circular shapes in a range of different sizes.
Then, move on to creating ovals, some long and thin, some medium and some larger in size.
Next, have a practice at drawing out different sizes of triangles, large, small, medium and tiny.
Draw these free-hand in HB pencil to start and then progress to sketching lightly with your propelling pencil.
When you sketch out the shapes to form your dog illustration, we will want them to be nice and light and easy to erase, aim to achieve a fluidity of hand, by this, I mean smooth curved lines.
As you will see from my examples, it is absolutely ok to achieve the sizes of shapes that you need by sketching several shapes on top of one another until you are happy with their size and form.
Once you have a bank of drawn shapes to refer to and feel your hand is well practiced, relaxed and flowing, you are ready to create the form of your chosen dog.
Step 1: Creating Your Dog’s Form
Position your photograph in front of you raised on a tablet screen or pin it onto a board propped up in front of you and begin to create the form of the dog’s body by using the series of shapes you have practiced.
Start by sketching out a circle for the head. Attach to that an oval shape for its snout.
Next, take a look at how your dog’s head joins to its body, you will notice here that I chose to use two overlapping circular shapes.
Then, see how I have used a medium sized circle to form the front body of my Cocker Spaniel, Obi. Overlapping this, I have used a large, longer oval shape on its side.
The ovals overlap, which helps to express where the muscles join and work beneath Obi’s golden fur.
I have used a smaller oval, positioned vertically to form the front right thigh muscle.
Whilst mapping out these circles and ovals, keep looking at your dog, focus on size and shape, not detail.
Now use a series of vertical ovals extending from the body to make the legs, making sure to consider your dog’s stance. Some breeds are stockier, while others are lean.
Think about how the weight of the dog is distributed and if they are standing alert and still or poised and ready to move. Consider how long your dog’s legs are in proportion to its body and keep asking yourself questions about how its limbs join to its body. Think also about where the dogs muscles are positioned without going into any detail at this stage, that will come later.
The dogs paws can be mapped out using ovals or circles depending on size and breed, look closely at the angles of the paws from the bottom of the dogs legs.
Lastly, I have used an oval shape to map out where Obi’s ear sits on the side of his head. Depending on the breed of dog, ears can be pointy, floppy, curly, sit upright or hang down and can be various basic triangular shapes.
Obi being a Spaniel does have ears that are like upside triangles, in the next stage, you will see how I have adapted the oval shape to form a triangle.
Remember at every stage to sketch lightly and that you are free to keep adapting the shapes as you go along.
Step 2: Define The Outer Shape
Once you have your shapes arranged forming the shape of your dog, take your pencil, look closely at the photograph and the outer shape of your dog’s body and start to draw the outer edge of your dog.
Don’t worry about any shapes your dogs fur may make at this stage, you are simply looking to achieve the outer shape of your dog (or you could say, its silhouette)
For demonstration purposes, I have used my fine line brush pen in sepia to go over the line that I created for Obi’s outer shape. Your line might be very sketchy to begin with, working on creating the shape of its body using the ovals and circles as your starting point.
You could go over your sketched lines too if you wanted to. Use one flowing line.
Step 3: Adding Body Detail
Next, it’s time to add a little detail to the body. Using some quickly sketched lines. Work your pencil in the direction of your dog’s fur, look for shadows created by the muscles of your dog beneath their fur and build up lines that start to show that the dog’s body is a 3 dimensional shape.
Please note in the image above I have exagerated the darkness of the outline for teaching purposes.
Eyes and Ears
Identifying the position of your dog’s eyes and ears. Unlike with positioning and drawing human facial features, a dog’s facial feature positioning alters depending on breed. This is where I find straight lines useful and also forming some triangular shapes. Sketch lines lightly by hand, no rulers here.
If you struggle to draw straight lines freehand, a good tip for practice is to draw along the edge of a piece of paper, it helps to train the hand eye coordination.
I decided on placement for the bottom of Obi’s eye first and drew a line across the bridge of his snout and across to where his ear would go.
Nose and Mouth
By creating a triangle from Obi’s eye to his ear and joining the end of his snout, I was able to check the length of his snout in proportion to his head and his body.
Because you are trying to create your dog to be approximately the same size as the dog in your photograph, you can use your piece of tracing paper to mark and check lengths and proportions as well if you choose. This isn’t cheating, it helps you to learn and to train your eye.
Plus it feels really great if you find our proportions start to match when you check your work!
If your proportions aren’t matching up, keep trying and adjusting, working lightly helps and you can remove any unwanted pencil lines even after inking up your drawing which feels satisfying.
When you sketch the curve of your dogs mouth, this is an opportunity to give him some character and expression at this stage. Obi typically has an upward curve to his mouth, I think he has a smile!
Tail Positioning
You will notice in my photograph that Obi’s tail is tucked away and out of view. The tail is another feature that will add character to your dog and one that you will need to position correctly in terms of the breed and proportion. Is the tail of your dog captured whilst wagging, held high or resting? You can use the oval method to decide on the shape, length and width of your dog’s tail or start by drawing a simple line with a curve to match your dog. Detail, curves or tassels can come later.
Adding Detail
You will notice in step three that I have had a play with adding some details around the edges of Obi and his features using a Sepia brush tip fine line pen. Then, I have added some loosely drawn marks. I applied these quite quickly, always looking at the photograph and quickly back to my drawing.
When creating fur detail, always work in the direction of growth and look for the shadow areas. You will notice shadow matches up to where your dog’s muscles are and changes in the fur may occur around the dog’s chest or collar, on his legs, on his ears, again depending on his breed. Obi has wavy hair on his ears, particularly when wet like he is here. He has curved tassels on the edges of his legs which I curved in the direction of growth and on his tail when it can be seen of course.
Step 4: Making A Trace (Optional)
For this step I made a tracing of my drawing so far and to keep the tracing light, reducing some of the experimental shading. I then took a 0.3 fine tip black pen to gently draw all around Obi’s outer edges and a little on his body.
Collar and Accessories
If your dog is wearing a collar like Obi is, you may wish to draw him without it but adding it in can add character to your drawing. Collars might be a simple band or they may have a tag which challenges you to draw metal or plastic disk, your dog may wear a bandana or a bow, a lovely contrast to your dogs fur and also opportunity to add a pop of colour later on.
Draw the collar shape and curve lightly to begin with, draw the curve in pencil first and then ink the lines when you are confident in your placement. Again, you can check this with your tracing paper if you wish.
Step 5: Inking your Drawing
Personally, I love working in fine line pen, especially when creating textures such as animal fur. I work with black and Sepia tone fine point tips and brush tips. I love the control that can be achieved when adding tiny details to a dog’s nose, eyes and mouth and also the way you can work quickly creating layers and dashes of fur.
You will notice that in Step Five, I have added fur to Obi and detail to his eyes, nose, mouth and collar.
When adding shade and tone, first look for the light. Identify the lightest areas on your dog, you want to keep them white, allow the paper to show. Build up some medium areas of shade, keep looking at your photograph, to your paper and work around your dog, move from one side of him to the other, always checking that you’re not going in too heavy.
It is best to work lightly, gradually build up medium areas by adding more lines on top and then identify the deepest, darkest areas of your dog’s fur. Start to layer lines more heavily but remain cautious, less is more often more when creating fur.
It’s really key to keep looking and checking, step back from your drawing every now and again. Also hold your drawing up next to your photograph as well. Check the overall effect. Keep movement and life in your dog’s fur by moving fairly quickly across his body with your pen.
You don’t have to work using fine lines only, it is up to you to experiment as you wish, remembering that the thickness of the lines can influence the overall feel of your artwork, thinner lines work well for detailed areas, while thicker lines can add depth and emphasis to specific features.
Adding Colour to your Drawing
I decided to produce my drawing of Obi using black, grey and Sepia tones. In addition to using fine tip pens, I mixed a little black water colour paint with water. I chose a small square ended brunch to lightly enhance Obi’s coat. Again, be very careful when adding fluid colour to your drawing. Start by mixing the lightest tone that you intend to use and gently dab colour onto your dog.
Areas such as the inner legs, around the collar and chin and the mouth and nose will all have darker tones. Identify them and carefully add a little paint to complete your study.
Choosing Colours and Application Techniques
So far, I have shown you how to add colour to your dog keeping your palette simple and using tones of grey with sepia, using the white of your paper as your lightest shade. You can use this technique to draw many dog breeds but you may wish to experiment with introducing more colour and technique.
For the main image of this article, I made illustrative studies of our dogs, Obi, Malc and Pete. Firstly sketching them out lightly in pencil and then adding watercolour tones to my drawings.
I kept the colour light and playful, I wanted to give the drawings a feeling of movement and fun avoiding overworking and adding carefully applied fine line pen to add the tiny details of their features along with a little more texture to their fur.
Ob’s fur is soft, fairly short, but curls on his ears, under his colar and on the backs of his legs he has tassels, keeping marks nice and loose and remembering the ‘less is more’ rule when it comes to drawing fur and hair, helps give my illustration of Obi a sense of fun and character.
Malc is a tri coloured Border Collie, his coat has a blue tone with an unusual but beautiful appearance and I wanted to emphasize this by avoiding mixing black with any of my colours and only using a dark navy for the darkest of his tones.
Pete looked handsome in his proud, seated position. He is a German Wirehaitred Pointer with a coat that sits in curly, wiry curls. I achieved the look using three tones of watercolour on his body with sepia tone fine line pen to add curly definition.
Again, just like with Malc, I avoided using black or mixing with it, keeping the fur on his face to a mixture of chocolate brown watercolour. I mixed up a navy to add deeper tones.
Final Tips
I find that working in layers suits best, reviewing often and taking a moment to compare my artwork with the photograph that I am working from regularly.
There are, of course, many techniques that you can experiment with to find which one suits you best to produce drawings and paintings of dogs.
For instance, I produced the illustration above of Obi, Malc and Pete above using a whole combination of art Materials, layering pen, pencil, watercolour and even acrylic paint which has a thicker, more layered finish that gives the piece a dense appearance and lots of texture.
Remember that practice is key, there are no set rules and capturing the personality of the dog is important, experiment with different styles and be brave. Share your work with friends and family or pop it online to gain some feedback.
Enjoy the journey into illustrating man’s best friends and I hope that your finished piece is the first of many more to come.
As a final inspiration. Here is another way of using my technique to show how to draw a sitting dog: